If I Saw Me on the Subway
I’d want to talk to me
I grew up knowing I was ugly and somehow misshapen. Worse, I thought I was the only one.
Now I find out that you thought you were the only broken, ugly one. Who knew?
There was a period there where I found magic glasses and danced fiercely into the world. I left the small town where I grew up and thought I was some kind of badass because I learned how to talk trash and shoot pool. And get blind drunk and start fights and get beat up and laugh about it the next day.
Over time, a price had to be paid for that dance. The days came when I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror. One awful day, such a bad miserable stinky lousy horror show of a day, I accidentally met my own gaze in the mirror and saw….nothing. No one. No person. No human. Nothing but an endless gaping need for MORE.
I didn’t realize it then but that was actually a very good day. It was Grace sneaking up on me to plant a big wet one on the back of my head.
They say that you’ve hit your bottom when you stop digging.
I stopped digging. I asked for help with tears and snot all over my face. Help was all around me in great loving heaps. Arms stretched out, hands pulled me up, laughter greeted me and love saved me.
It hasn’t been an overnight kind of thing.
But recently, I realized that if I saw me on the 2 train during rush hour some random Tuesday, I’d want to talk to me. And if I missed my chance I might just go post something on Missed Connections on Craigslist (yep, it’s still there).
You were on the Bronx bound 2 train around 6 pm tonight and you were reading something by Colm Toibin but I couldn’t see the title. I got on at Times Square so it was packed and I thought you wouldn’t see me but at 72nd Street you looked up and smiled at the lady holding the baby next to me. Man, what I wouldn’t do to have you smile like that at me. If you read this, and I sure hope you do, ping me. I feel like we’d connect like crazy!
I used to fantasize about some person, some man or woman somewhere who would see me and want to reach out to me like that. Who would stare at me helplessly, hoping I’d look back at them.
And all the time it was me I needed to connect with, me who needed to say those loving and funny and meaningful things to me.
Go figure.
Try that sometime. Try saying all the amazing, insightful, generous, loving things to yourself that you’ve been hoping to hear from someone’s lips. Make them your lips that give you that love. The gods know you deserve it. We all do and very few of us believe it.
Now, go say something nice to yourself! There’s a seriously magnificent relationship waiting to get started.
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